Urban Fantasy, Young Adult || Ava is a firebugshe can start fires with her mind. Which would all be well and good if she weren't caught in a deadly contract with the Coterie, a magical mafia. She's one of their main hitmen and she doesn't like it one bit. Not least because her boss, Venus, killed Ava's mother.

I can tell you the exact moment I discovered Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I was about fifteen and fortunate enough to be on a trip to England with my father and stepmother. Though I considered myself to be lucky, I was also in dire straits—my Walkman was dead, I’d read all my books, and I was stuck in a car with two adults who were constantly fighting and all of my coping mechanisms had been used up. I was desperate for a book. I think any lifelong reader will understand the panic of being stuck somewhere stressful without a good book. (Or really any book, for that matter.)

We had stopped to see some famous rock circle—I can’t remember which one, only that it wasn’t Stonehenge. However, I do remember that they had a little gift shop, and in that little gift shop amongst the knickknacks and postcards was a single spinner rack of paperback fantasy titles written by a man named Terry Pratchett. I’d never heard of Terry Pratchett, and I didn’t care. I grabbed the first two and proceeded to beg my stepmother for them. Another lucky stroke in my life—both my mother and my stepmother were readers and they almost always supported my book habit. I’m forever grateful for this.

Fellow fans of Whimsy—I hope you’re well, and not spending the rest of the summer hyperventilating in a cave somewhere, thanks to the latest news cycle. If you are, I hope the cave is tricked out and cozy, like a giant hug from the Earth itself.

As a person who grew up reading books with elves, vampires, wizards, and scantily clad ladies on the cover, I am well versed in book shame. I read voraciously and well above my level as a child, according to whatever arcane and mysterious forces that decide such things as reading levels. You would think that would be enough to make adults happy, but it never was, for some. Sure, I read, but I wasn’t reading the “right sort” of books. The funny fact was that the “right sort” differed wildly depending on the person doing the judging. I feel like all of you out there in Whimsy Land have probably found yourselves on the receiving end of this sentence:

Some time back, when I still had cable, I fell asleep on the couch and woke up at three in the morning to a documentary about Pablo Escobar’s hippos. It was a topic so weird that my brain refused to believe it was true. Clearly, I was still dreaming. The very idea that a drug kingpin would (A) buy hippos for his own zoo, and then (B) that those hippos would get loose and start to take over the countryside, seemed ridiculous. When I got up the next morning, I looked it up online convinced that my brain had produced it during some sort of bizarre fever dream.

It was 100% true, and I still can’t believe it. That documentary immediately sprang to mind when I saw the summary for River of Teeth by Sara Gailey. I thought, “This sounds absolutely bananas.” Followed by, “I need to read this.”

I know what you’re thinking—Necessary Whimsy! It’s been awhile! We thought your absence meant that tides had changed and everything is better now!

Oh, my adorable book nerd friends. What I love about you is your optimism. April has brought many a spring shower, and the muck just keeps getting deeper…but you know what helps with that? Books. And you know what helps even more with that? Books full of sassy-mouthed ladies.

If you look back on my childhood report cards (and why would you, weirdo? You’re not my mom… unless you are my mom. In which case, hello! Please burn my old report cards), you will notice a trend. That trend can be paraphrased as, “Lish is a good student, we just wish she would stop talking quite so much.” My brothers had similar comments on theirs, and my mom once had her mouth duct taped shut by her teacher. So I come by my chatterbox ways honestly. Which means that I have an affinity for characters with the same issue. If they are also prone to sass, all the better, because as you might have guessed, I also heard the phrase “you need to watch your smart mouth” on a pretty much constant loop.

Books have been my go-to comfort objects for a long time. My brother, Jeremy, likes to tell a funny story about a childhood sailing trip—we were on a boat with my father, our cousin, and my brother’s friend when my dad decided to try and “beat a storm.” Which went about as well as you’d expect. We lost both anchors and started taking on water from the large swells that were breaking over the ship. Everyone who knew how to sail was wretchedly seasick and my brother’s friend had to use the radio to call in a mayday. As the storm was starting to wind down, Jeremy found me nose-deep in a copy of David Edding’s Queen of Sorcery. When he asked me what on earth I was doing, I replied that I wanted to finish the book before I died.

When my brother trots the story out, he still looks at me like I’m an alien. In my defense, I had done what I could, but I knew nothing about boats and beyond offering sympathy, there’s not much you can do for people dealing with seasickness. He’s also never been a reader and didn’t understand the soothing balm that books were to me. But as I got older, I realized that some books were better than others for this. There’s a direct connection to what I read and my corresponding mental state. If I read nothing but Clive Barker and Stephen King, I wind up getting a little depressed. But if I stuck to funnier books—books full of whimsy, as it were—I did better.

Today we are going to look into the deepest, darkest pit, writer friends. We are going to not only stare into the abyss, we are going to invite it for tea and tiny fear cookies. Because today we are going to talk about something that all authors dread:

No-show events.

They are going to happen. As an author, you will at some point throw a party and no one will show up.

Please enjoy this encore post on preparing for book events, originally published October 2016.

So now your book is being published and you’re overwhelmed in general about things, and in specific about this event, and WHEN WILL THE HELPFUL EVENT WIZARD SHOW UP AND HELP YOU?

The wizard is in, friends, and it’s time to roll for initiative.

First, as a shiny new author, you should rethink how you look at events. It’s not just a single blip on your calendar and done. It’s a continuum. Your book event is like the first date in a long and fruitful relationship with a particular bookstore. Many authors have their first book events at their local bookstore, so this is a vital relationship.

And much like dating, debut book events can be confusing and stress-inducing. So where does a new author start?

So now your book is being published and you’re overwhelmed in general about things, and in specific about this event, and WHEN WILL THE HELPFUL EVENT WIZARD SHOW UP AND HELP YOU?

The wizard is in, friends, and it’s time to roll for initiative.

First, as a shiny new author, you should rethink how you look at events. It’s not just a single blip on your calendar and done. It’s a continuum. Your book event is like the first date in a long and fruitful relationship with a particular bookstore. Many authors have their first book events at their local bookstore, so this is a vital relationship.

And much like dating, debut book events can be confusing and stress-inducing. So where does a new author start?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the movie The Princess Bride. Which, really, has been sort of a semi-consistent thing since childhood. Lately, though, something has occurred to me, and really, I don’t know why I didn’t think about this before. It’s about Westley. Namely, it’s the Dread Pirate Roberts problem.

Now, farm boy Westley is great—don’t get me wrong, but he’s a bit doormat-ish: sweet and kind, but lacking a little…something. Even as a child I though Buttercup was kind of a brat in the beginning and I wanted Westley to stick up for himself a little. So Farm Boy Westley wasn’t my thing. However, later in the film when he shows back up dressed all in black, expertly wielding a sword and full of swagger? We as the audience can’t help but love him.

Ava is a firebug—she can start fires with her mind. Which would all be well and good if she weren’t caught in a deadly contract with the Coterie, a magical mafia. She’s one of their main hitmen… and she doesn’t like it one bit. Not least because her boss, Venus, killed Ava’s mother.

When Venus asks Ava to kill a family friend, Ava rebels. She knows very well that you can’t say no to the Coterie and expect to get away with it, though, so she and her friends hit the road, trying desperately to think of a way out of the mess they find themselves in—preferably keeping the murder to a minimum.

Check out an excerpt below from Lish McBride’s Firebug, available September 23rd from Henry Holt! You can also find out more about the cover design process here.

With the defeat of the evil Douglas behind him, Sam LaCroix is getting used to his new life. Okay, so he hadn’t exactly planned on being a powerful necromancer with a seat on the local magical council and a capricious werewolf sort-of-girlfriend, but things are going fine, right?

Well . . . not really. He’s pretty tired of getting beat up by everyone and their mother, for one thing, and he can’t help but feel that his new house hates him. His best friend is a werebear, someone is threatening his sister, and while Sam realizes that he himself has a lot of power at his fingertips, he’s not exactly sure how to use it. Which, he has to admit, is a bit disconcerting.

But when everything starts falling apart, he decides it’s time to step up and take control. His attempts to do so just bring up more questions, though, the most important of which is more than a little alarming: Is Douglas really dead?

I grew up watching horror movies. Just to give you an idea of what kind of time span we’re talking about, I’ll just say that while vampires were continuing their trend in becoming sexy blood-suckers, werewolves were still being portrayed as mindless, violent creatures who wanted to eat your face. So we’re talking the days of Silver Bullet, The Howling, and, of course (one my favorites), Monster Squad, which teaches us that Wolfman does indeed have “nards.”

I still love a good werewolf movie. The last decade has spawned some greats, like Dog Soldiers and Brotherhood of the Wolf, and I’m loving the variety. There’s more depth and breadth to the genre than some people think. They’re not all slaughter films. Some, like Ladyhawke, go with a different kind of werewolf all together, and involve a young Matthew Broderick climbing through a medieval sewer system. (Tell me that didn’t just sell you right there.)